Oct. 3, 2023 – Celebrate the Freedom to Read October 1-7 by checking out a Banned Book.
The Cedar Rapids Public Library partnered with Amnesty International for a Celebration of the Freedom to Read at the Downtown Library on October 2. They shared a suggested banned book reading list. The nonprofit worked with the Women’s Human Rights Co-group to compile a list of reading suggestions from books that are or have been banned in the past. Last week, we shared their fiction selections. This week, we are sharing their nonfiction picks.
Book descriptions are excerpted from the Women's Human Rights Co-group list.
"Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot" by Mikki Kendall
Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?
"Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage" by Rachel E. Gross
The Latin term for the female genitalia, pudendum, means “parts for which you should be ashamed.” Until 1651, ovaries were called female testicles. The fallopian tubes are named for a man. Named, claimed, and shamed: Welcome to the story of the female body, as penned by men.
Today, a new generation of (mostly) women scientists is finally redrawing the map. With modern tools and fresh perspectives, they’re looking at the organs traditionally bound up in reproduction – the uterus, ovaries, vagina – and seeing within them a new biology of change and resilience. Through their eyes, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on an anatomical odyssey to the center of this new world – a world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves. Full of wit and wonder, "Vagina Obscura" is a celebratory testament to how the landscape of knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.
"Bodies on the Line" by Lauren Rankin
In this powerful, empathetic look at abortion clinic escorting, Lauren Rankin offers a call to action for a post-Roe America.
"White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners" by Narges Mohammadi
Extended solitary confinement has been condemned as a severe violation of human rights. Yet it is still widely used in Iranian prisons. In "White Torture," thirteen women, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, share their experiences of harassment and beatings by guards, total blindfolding and denial of medical treatment. Angry interrogators threaten their families and lie about their whereabouts. One prisoner is even told she is dead.
None of the women have committed crimes – they are prisoners of conscience or held hostage as bargaining chips. Through psychological torture, the Iranian state hopes to remake their souls. These interviews, carried out while each woman was in prison or facing charges, are astounding documents of resistance and integrity. "White Torture" unveils the rot at the heart of the Iranian legal system and calls on us to act for change.
"Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism" by Karima Bennoune
Eye-opening accounts of heroic resistance to religious extremism. In Lahore, Pakistan, Faizan Peerzada resisted being relegated to a "dark corner" by staging a performing arts festival despite bomb attacks. In Senegal, wheelchair user Aissatou Cisse produced a comic book to illustrate the injustices faced by disabled women and girls. In Algeria, publisher Omar Belhouchet and his journalists struggled to put out their paper, "El Watan (The Nation)," the same night that a 1996 jihadist bombing devastated their offices and killed eighteen of their colleagues. In Afghanistan, Young Women for Change took to the streets of Kabul to denounce sexual harassment, undeterred by threats. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Abdirizak Bihi organized a Ramadan basketball tournament among Somali refugees to counter the influence of Al Shabaab. From Karachi to Tunis, Kabul to Tehran, across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and beyond, these trailblazers often risked death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries. But this global community of writers, artists, doctors, musicians, museum curators, lawyers, activists, and educators of Muslim heritage remains largely invisible, lost amid the heated coverage of Islamist terror attacks on one side and abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists on the other.
A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism, Karima Bennoune draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews to illuminate the inspiring stories of those who represent one of the best hopes for ending fundamentalist oppression worldwide.
"The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World" by Michelle Goldberg
Women's rights are often treated as mere appendages to great questions of war, peace, poverty, and economic development. But as networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women's bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise, with the United States often supporting the most reactionary forces.
In a work of incisive cultural analysis and deep reporting, Michelle Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the twenty-first century. "The Means of Reproduction" travels through four continents, examining issues such as abortion, female circumcision, and Asia's missing girls to show how the battle over women's bodies has been globalized and how, too often, the United States has joined sworn enemies such as Iran and Sudan in an axis of repression. Reporting with unique insight from both the rarefied realm of international policy and from individual women's lives, Goldberg elucidates the economic, demographic, and health consequences of women's oppression, which affect more than half the world's population.
"Call Us What We Carry: Poems" by Amanda Gorman
Formerly titled "The Hill We Climb and Other Poems," Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry. "Call Us What We Carry" is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.
"How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future" by Maria Ressa
From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, an impassioned and inspiring memoir of a career spent holding power to account.
Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rappler crowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections.
But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country's most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyber libel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines.
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that canmake the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “po white trash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age – and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell inl ove with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
"Unbowed: One Woman's Story" by Wangari Maathai
Born in a rural Kenyan village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most African girls then were uneducated. In her remarkable and inspiring autobiography, she tells of her studies with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelors and master's degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. She tells of her numerous run-ins with the brutal government of Daniel arap Moi and of the political and personal reasons that compelled her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa, and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages.
Maathai's extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves as Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources and as a Member of Parliament. Eventually her achievement was internationally recognized in the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her 'contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace'.
"Living Shrines of Uyghur China: Photographs by Lisa Ross" by Lisa Ross & Alexandre Papas (Introduction)
Art photographs of strikingly beautiful and austere shrines of saints and pilgrimage sites erected by the Uyghurs (a mystic, pacifistic branch of Islam) in the deserts of Western China that are threatened by that country's rapid development will appeal to all interested in art, Central Asia, and Chinese or Islamic culture.
Lisa Ross's ethereal photographs of Islamic holy sites were created over the course of a decade on journeys to China's Xinjiang region in Central Asia, historically a cultural crossroads but an area to which artists and researchers have generally been denied access since its annexation in 1949. These monumental images show shrines created during pilgrimages, many of which have been maintained continuously over several centuries; visitation to the tombs of saints is a central aspect of daily life in Uyghur Islam, and its pilgrims ask for intercession for physical, mental, and spiritual ailments.
